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Austere, Enigmatic Innovator. And Charming Fellow, Really.

A scene from Deafman Glance, an early work by Robert Wilson, from Katharina Otto-Bernsteins documentary Absolute Wilson.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

IT began when Robert Wilson, the world-famous theatrical innovator, bummed a cigarette from Katharina Otto-Bernstein at a 1998 gathering in the Hamptons. “Don’t you hate these cocktail parties?” she recalls him asking her. “I absolutely do,” she told him, “especially since I’m the hostess.”

The conversation might have ended right there. But, Mr. Wilson said in a recent phone interview, “We just seemed to get along.” And so the conversation continued, first for three hours at the party and then, in fits and starts, over the next six years. Now some of its more remarkable turns are available to all in Ms. Otto-Bernstein’s wide-ranging documentary film “Absolute Wilson,” which opens Friday at the Quad and at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas — just steps, as it happens, from the Metropolitan Opera, the scene of Mr. Wilson’s triumphant “Einstein on the Beach,” the mammoth opera created in 1976 with Philip Glass.

Excerpts from “Einstein,” along with snippets of other visually stunning, slowly unfolding works like “Deafman Glance” and “The Black Rider,” punctuate “Absolute Wilson.” Collaborators, from Jessye Norman to David Byrne, as well as scholars and critics have their say about Mr. Wilson’s 40-year career as a director, designer and provocateur. (Susan Sontag, in one of her last interviews, said she had seen “Einstein” some 40 times.) Ms. Otto-Bernstein, whose previous documentary, “Beautopia” (1998), was a wry look at aspiring models, got Mr. Wilson’s younger sister, Suzanne, to talk about their early years in Texas. But the most remarkable moments in the film come from Mr. Wilson himself.

“I’ve never talked so much about my personal life in public,” he said by telephone while waiting to travel from Paris to Hamburg — a trip complicated by the loss of his passport. “I’ve tried to let the work speak for itself. In this case, I thought, ‘Why not?’ I felt Katharina was the right person to have the dialogue with.”

It’s easy to see why Mr. Wilson, who turned 65 earlier this month, was taken with her. A blue-eyed blonde with an expressive face and a genial laugh, Ms. Otto-Bernstein, 38, exhibits traces of both her native Germany and her English schooling when she speaks. But what’s most notable about her, as she sips cappuccino not far from her Upper East Side apartment, is the total engagement she brings to a conversation. That engagement is reflected in the film by Mr. Wilson’s own, as he talks about growing up in Waco, the stuttering, learning-impaired, gay son of a prominent father and a distant mother.

Ms. Otto-Bernstein was determined to get him to open up about his childhood, given the imagery that fills his work. “You always have a child, you always have the marginal person, the strong father figure, the silent mother figure,” she says. “Whether it’s ‘Woyzeck’ or ‘Deafman Glance,’ it’s always sort of retelling the same story. You gather that there’s some sort of conflict within himself that he needs to express through his work and dissolve this inner knot.”

Photo

Robert WilsonCredit
Noburo Takahashi/Lincoln Center

After trailing him for four years in Europe and at his summer base on Long Island, she says, she felt the interviews she had filmed were not sufficiently revealing. “I said, ‘It’s now or never, Bob.’ He said, ‘O.K., but only you.’ ” She rolls her eyes as she tells the story. “I hadn’t set lights since film school!” she says. Nonetheless, she prepared lights, camera, sound and questions, and waited. And waited. And waited.

Mr. Wilson arrived after 10 p.m. for an 8 p.m. appointment, she says, grimacing. Then she brightens, putting a big smile on her face and a bit of Texas twang in her words as she recalls his greeting: “Hi. I’m starving.” So, she says, sounding a little like an indulgent mother, she made him an omelet and poured him a vodka. Then he talked to her camera until 4 a.m., recounting, among other things, the suicide attempt that landed him in a mental hospital in Texas when he returned home from college. “Not even his boyfriend knew about it,” she says of his pill overdose.

He was released from the institution, he says in the film, on a Friday, and by Saturday he was headed to New York and the percolating downtown arts scene. “His real formative years were in the 60’s and 70’s, in an avant-garde theater I knew nothing about,” Ms. Otto-Bernstein says. “Which was a good thing.” Asking “naïve” questions, she says, led her down surprising paths. “This way the audience discovers with you the man. If I had known all these things, I think it would have been more academic. I would have concentrated more on the work than the life.”

Mr. Wilson saw the film for the first time at the Berlin International Film Festival, in February. Ms. Otto-Bernstein says she was worried he might leave in the middle of the screening. He didn’t. He found the survey of his life’s work therapeutic: “It’s been good to look at what I’ve done and get some perspective on where I want to go,” he said in the phone interview. . “It’s like cleaning house.”

He added: “I learned something from seeing it. I learned things about myself I’d never even thought about. I never thought about the relationship of my mother, my family to the content of my work. She looked at it psychologically; I’ve always been more involved in making the stuff than analyzing it.”

Ms. Otto-Bernstein was a Wilson fan, but not by any means a scholar. And she thinks a lot of the intellectual constructs that have been proffered to explain his work are, well, hooey. “The missing link between Dada and contemporary, the continuation of Artaud, the Wieland Wagner of the present time, tra-la-li, tra-la-lo,” she says. “I think a lot of things were happenstance. Jacques Derrida was working with the deconstruction of language. I’m sure Bob was aware of it. But he didn’t go, ‘Oh, deconstruction of language — let’s put that on the stage.’ ”

What he did put on the stage, an enormous body of work that for all its beauty can be austere and enigmatic, is the opposite of the man, Ms. Otto-Bernstein says. His charm and sense of humor come through in the film. “He’s great to be with,” she says, and even her pet would probably agree. “He will sit down with the dog and throw the tennis ball 400 times. With me, he was never the diva.”

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Provocateur? Robert Wilson in 2000 with a portrait of Gertrude Stein.Credit
Noburo Takahashi/Lincoln Center

Still, the film shows him to be an exacting and sometimes exasperating taskmaster as he travels the globe putting on his shows: blowing up at an Italian lighting crew while a nervous translator conveys his tantrum; adjusting and readjusting the precise angle of Isabelle Huppert’s hand as she appears to lose her patience; testily working the phone to try to salvage “The Civil Wars,” the ill-fated magnum opus that was to be the centerpiece of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles.

“It was made clear to me,” Ms. Otto-Bernstein says, “that we do not talk about ‘The Civil Wars.’ It was taboo.”

Taboo or not, Ms. Otto-Bernstein interviewed several people — though not Mr. Wilson — about it. And her film includes scenes from Howard Brookner’s 1987 documentary, “Robert Wilson and ‘The Civil Wars,’ ” which was supposed to record the making of the project and instead chronicled its unmaking, as the Los Angeles sponsors reneged on the promised financial support, preventing the six components, created in different countries by different composers to Mr. Wilson’s libretto, from ever being performed together.

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Ms. Otto-Bernstein was able to put her hands on a remarkable amount of such archival material. The main source of the film’s newspaper articles, photographs and film clips was Mr. Wilson’s “famous warehouse in New Jersey,” which she describes as “things in boxes, mislabeled.” Former members of the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, the theater collective Mr. Wilson founded in 1968, shared their Super-8 home movies. She unearthed forgotten film records of early Wilson dance performances that surprised even Mr. Wilson.

But, Ms. Otto-Bernstein says, Mr. Wilson’s earlier works are better preserved than his later ones. Too often, when she asked theaters for recordings of recent Wilson productions, they provided her with “black-and-white VHS with a line through it.” She was incredulous. “With all the money they blow,” she sputters, “they can’t spend $5,000 for a good digital camera and have it for the archive?”

As for her own archive, it now has some 40 hours of Wilson conversations, plus many more interviews, clippings, photographs and designs that didn’t make it into the film. Ms. Otto-Bernstein has recycled some of her research in a large-format, 270-page book, “Absolute Wilson: The Biography,” published in the spring by the German-based publisher Prestel.

In Europe, where Mr. Wilson enjoys rock-star status, he has been signing books. His passportless trip from Paris to Germany, which was eventually accomplished with the help of a private plane, was occasioned by the opening of the movie and a book signing.

At this point, Ms. Otto-Bernstein says , they are friends, and he is helping her sell her book as a favor. “He has no stake in it,” she says. “He’s very kind.” There’s a pause. “Very late. But very kind.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR13 of the New York edition with the headline: Austere, Enigmatic Innovator. And Charming Fellow, Really. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe